Dance is the most fragile of the arts in that it cannot flourish in isolation or with long fallow periods. Any rupture is deeply destructive. Steady financing is critical to provide facilities, maintain companies, and nurture the living link between teacher and student down the generations.
Dance in the U.S. has never enjoyed the high prestige it has in Europe and Russia, where state and civic funding is a given. One reason for this is that classical ballet, which descends from the royal court world, is gloriously embedded in national history. It is remarkable, for example, that even after the Bolsheviks toppled the czars, the socialist Soviet Union preserved ballet as the Russian people’s cultural heritage.
America, in contrast, never had or wanted a titled aristocracy. Despite the waves of ethnic immigration since then, our cultural roots stubbornly remain in New England Puritanism, with its business-oriented practicality, sexual prudery, and suspicion of art and beauty. The Puritan residue in America still manifests itself in uneasiness about nudity and in periodic calls for censorship of art and entertainment. The frontier code of masculinity also survives, impugning the virility of male dancers and making it difficult to attract American boys to dance schools.
Popular dance, from jitterbug to disco and hip-hop, has a strong presence in the U.S. Tap, for example, which has massively revived, is respected by mainstream audiences for its dynamic, upbeat athleticism and its evocation of classic all-American movies. It’s art dance that the general public has trouble with. Most people living outside the sophisticated metropolises or university centers will never see a professional production of live dance. Despite its tremendously loyal and knowledgeable core audience, serious dance simply doesn’t exist for most Americans.
Unlike the visual arts, dance lacks the public relations vehicle of blockbuster museum shows to spread the word. We no longer have a Rudolf Nureyev or a Mikhail Baryshnikov in his prime, charismatic superstars whose offstage adventures were covered by glossy, general-interest magazines. Prime-time TV variety shows (such as The Ed Sullivan Show or Omnibus), which once showcased dance, are long gone. Public broadcasting features opera or popular shows like Riverdance but rarely airs productions of classical ballet or modern dance. Music videos have also waned since the 1980s, when Michael Jackson and the Graham-trained Madonna made news through dance.
As with many fields (including literary criticism), professionals may not realize the degree to which they are talking mainly to each other. Outreach is not just about fostering dance instruction but about spreading dance consciousness to the public at large. Dance education should be built into the educational curriculum, so that even those who will never set foot in a dance studio will have a basic knowledge of dance history.
What is desperately needed is a standardized middle-school or high-school-level elective that focuses on dance. Ideally multicultural in orientation, it would trace dance from its birth in religious ritual and folk dance to the evolution of classical ballet and modern dance styles. It would be useful to incorporate Asian martial arts into this survey to enlarge the common definition of dance.
The National Endowment for the Arts or a consortium of private foundations should commission the creation of a provisional dance history course, outlined in a handbook buttressed by video and Web resources. Sample syllabi could be adapted by school districts nationwide at minimal expense. But in the meantime, dance professionals themselves, perhaps through local lectures or newspaper articles, must seek ways to promote not just the technique but the vision of dance to their wider communities.
* [“Rants & Raves: How Can Dance Education Compete with the Power of the Media?,” Dance Magazine, July 2005.]
46
CONTROVERSY AT THE BROOKLYN MUSEUM*
The frontier between politics and art was commandeered for the past two weeks by New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani in his attack on the “Sensation” show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, a once dignified institution that has in my view disgraced itself by this detour into the tacky. Of the behavior of some museum curators and library directors, a Salon reader writes to ask “why liberals charged with the public trust go out of their way to incense the public.”
The rote attacks on Giuliani have been deafening. While the mayor certainly exceeded his authority in demanding that the entire show be stopped (rather than simply denouncing individual works that did not merit public funding), I am frankly enjoying his assault on the arts establishment, which is in dire need of a shake-up. I have nothing but contempt for Brooklyn Museum director Arnold Lehman, who was hired two years ago and whose suitability for that position, on the basis of the present debacle, seems questionable.
“What a whiny slug!” I declared as Lehman nervously defended himself on TV. He struck me as an affected provincial oblivious to the fact that the zenith in campy collections of 1950s Tupperware and Formica kitchen tables was about, oh, fifteen years ago. The liberal casuists who sprang to unqualified defense of Lehman and his show (which includes not just Chris Ofili’s dung-and-porn-adorned Madonna but a rotting cow’s head and a formaldehyde-suspended bisected pig) seem to have lost sight of the larger question: what should be the role and status of art in the United States?
Since the Puritan hegemony of three centuries ago, it has been a struggle for art to win acceptance here. Each of these incidents of religious desecration or of ostentatious decadent display (I speak as a sympathetic theorist of decadence in Sexual Personae) simply poisons the cultural atmosphere and ensures popular hostility to art and artists.
The price for this pointless provocation will be paid by schoolchildren whose arts programs are gutted for lack of funding. Sure enough, Republican presidential candidate Elizabeth Dole has just responded to the Brooklyn exhibit (which she calls “highly offensive”) by calling for the complete abolition of the National Endowment for the Arts, which had nothing to do with this show.
As an arts educator, I think that the behavior of the Brooklyn Museum has been self-interested and shortsighted. I want to raise the prestige of art in this country; I want to expand opportunities for young artists and to radically increase funding for community arts projects. The entire future of American art is at stake.
How ironic that Jane Alexander rejoined her actor friends on the barricades last week to support the Brooklyn Museum, since in “American Canvas,” her valedictory report as she left the NEA chairmanship two years ago, she sharply criticized the elitism separating American artists from the communities they should serve. The Brooklyn show is a perfect example of the improper diversion of public monies—in this case to aggrandize a single British collector, an obnoxious advertising executive of dubious taste.
At the end of the twentieth century, when popular culture has triumphed, the mission of museums must be to evangelize for art, to demonstrate art’s higher meanings and continuing relevance to a mass audience that will otherwise be consumed in the blood-and-guts literalism of slasher films and shoot-’em-up action-adventures. The Brooklyn show illustrates the utter bankruptcy and sterility of the avant-garde, which collapsed thirty years ago and is now desperately grasping at straws to get a reaction, even of disgust, from an indifferent public.
Great works of art, like the monumental Laocoön (with its giant serpent strangling the agonized Trojan priest and his two sons), can be made out of Hellenistic sensationalism—coincidentally a focus of my advanced seminar in aesthetics this semester at the University of the Arts. But the most lurid works in the Brooklyn show are pure kitsch. If I want to see carcasses or body parts floating in formaldehyde, I’ll go to the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia—a spectacular and grisly nineteenth-century medical collection that I recommend to everyone.
Contemporary art, with its postmodernist gimmicks, is so divorced from science that Damien Hirst’s high-school-project rot-and-fly cycle strikes some museum-goers as a profound revelation. (Wow, nature exists! Rise and shine, Ma
nhattan!) We’re back to Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, which four decades ago showed the cul-de-sac of modern intellectualism in scenes where chic partygoers raptly listen to nature sounds on a tape recorder and where an erudite, angst-dazed father murders his children in their beds.
Let’s get past this adolescent wallowing in slack “oppositional” art. The Romantic era of “subversive” gestures is over. As I have consistently maintained since my 1991 defense of photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in Tikkun (where I derided his sentimentalizing liberal supporters), no self-respecting avant-garde artist should be on the government dole. Free speech protections in the U.S. do not extend to financial support of “cutting-edge” new art by taxpayers. Commissioned projects—whether by the pharaohs, the Medici, the popes, or the French kings—always require the artist’s subordination to the values and publicity needs of the patron.
And I’m just as sick of Catholic-bashing as Giuliani himself. I may be an atheist, but I was raised in Italian Catholicism, and it remains my native culture. I oppose Mayor Giuliani’s arbitrary and needlessly inflammatory use of city power to intimidate and harass an arts institution, but I applaud the position he has taken against an arrogant, pretentious, parasitic arts establishment that has made a mockery of art and injured its reputation in the eyes of the nation at large. The Brooklyn Museum has turned itself into Madame Tussaud’s Waxworks—a collegiate carnival and tinny video game for desensitized poseurs who fiddle while Rome burns.
* [Salon.com column, October 6, 1999.]
47
THE MAGIC OF IMAGES:
WORD AND PICTURE IN A MEDIA AGE*
Education has failed to adjust to the massive transformation in Western culture since the rise of electronic media. The shift from the era of the printed book to that of television, with its immediacy and global reach, was prophesied by Marshall McLuhan in his revolutionary Understanding Media, which at its publication in 1964 spoke with visionary force to my generation of college students in the United States. But those of us who were in love with the dazzling, darting images of TV and movies, as well as with the surging rhythms of new rock music, had been given through public education a firm foundation in the word and the book. Decade by decade since the 1960s, popular culture, with its stunning commercial success, has gained strength until it now no longer is the brash alternative to organized religion or an effete literary establishment: it is the culture for American students, who outside urban centers have little exposure to the fine arts. I cannot speak for Canadian or European students, whom I have had little opportunity to observe closely over time. But because the U.S. is the driving media engine for the world, what happens there may well be a harbinger for the future of all industrialized nations.
Interest in and patience with long, complex books and poems have alarmingly diminished not only among college students but college faculty in the U.S. It is difficult to imagine American students today, even at elite universities, gathering impromptu at midnight for a passionate discussion of big, challenging literary works like Dostoyevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov—a scene I witnessed in a recreation room strewn with rock albums at my college dormitory in upstate New York in 1965. As a classroom teacher for over thirty years, I have become increasingly concerned about evidence of, if not cultural decline, then cultural dissipation since the 1960s, a decade that seemed to hold such heady promise of artistic and intellectual innovation. Young people today are flooded with disconnected images but lack a sympathetic instrument to analyze them as well as a historical frame of reference in which to situate them. I am reminded of an unnerving scene in Stanley Kubrick’s epic film 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an astronaut, his air hose cut by the master computer gone amok, spins helplessly off into space. The new generation, raised on TV and the personal computer but deprived of a solid primary education, has become unmoored from the mother ship of culture. Technology, like Kubrick’s rogue computer, HAL, is the companionable servant turned ruthless master. The ironically self-referential or overtly politicized and jargon-ridden paradigms of higher education, far from helping the young to cope or develop, have worsened their vertigo and free fall. Today’s students require not subversion of rationalist assumptions—the childhood legacy of intellectuals born in Europe between the two World Wars—but the most basic introduction to structure and chronology. Without that, they are riding the tail of a comet in a media starscape of explosive but evanescent images.
The extraordinary technological aptitude of the young comes partly from their now-instinctive ability to absorb information from the flickering TV screen, which evolved into the glassy monitor of the omnipresent personal computer. Television is reality for them: nothing exists unless it can be filmed or until it is rehashed onscreen by talking heads. The computer, with its multiplying forums for spontaneous free expression from e-mail to listservs and blogs, has increased facility and fluency of language but degraded sensitivity to the individual word and reduced respect for organized argument, the process of deductive reasoning. The jump and jitter of U.S. commercial television have demonstrably reduced attention span in the young. The Web too, with its addictive unfurling of hypertext, encourages restless acceleration.
Knowing how to “read” images is a crucial skill in this media age, but the style of cultural analysis currently prevalent in universities is, in my view, counterproductive in its anti-media bias and intrusive social agenda. It teaches students suspicion and paranoia and, with its abstract European terminology, does not offer an authentic anthropology of the North American media environment in which they came to consciousness. Post-structuralism and postmodernism do not understand magic or mystique, which are intrinsic to art and imagination. It is no coincidence that since postmodernist terminology seeped into the art world in the 1980s, the fine arts have receded as a major cultural force. Creative energy is flowing instead into animation, video games, and cyber-tech, where the young are pioneers. Character-driven feature films, on the other hand, have steadily fallen in quality since the early 1990s, partly because of Hollywood’s increasing use of computer graphics imaging (CGI) and special effects, advanced technology that threatens to displace the live performing arts.
Computer enhancement has spread to still photography in advertisements, fashion pictorials, and magazine covers, where the human figure and face are subtly elongated or remodeled at will. Caricature is our ruling mode. In the last decade in the U.S., there has also been a relentless speeding up of editing techniques, using flashing, even blinding, strobe-like effects that make it impossible for the eye to linger over any image or even to fully absorb it. There has been a reduction of spatial depth in image-making: one can no longer “read” distance in digitally enhanced or holographic films, where detail has a uniform, lapidary quality rather than the misty atmospherics of receding planes, so familiar to us from post-Renaissance art based on observation of nature. Movies have followed the TV model in neglecting background, the sophisticated craft of mise-en-scène. Distorting lenses and camera angles producing warped, tunnel-like effects (as in Mannerism or Expressionism) deny the premise of habitable human space. Subtlety and variety in color tones have been lost: historical stories are routinely steeped in all-purpose sepia, while serious dramas and science-fiction films are often given a flat, muted, shadowless light, as if mankind has fled underground.
The visual environment for the young, in short, has become confused, fragmented, and unstable. Students now understand moving but not still images. The long, dreamy, contemplative takes of classic Hollywood studio movies or postwar European art films are long gone. Today’s rapid-fire editing descends from Jean-Luc Godard, with his hand-held camera, and more directly from Godard’s Anglo-American acolyte, Richard Lester, whose two Beatles movies have heavily influenced commercials, music videos, and independent films. Education must slow the images down, to provide a clear space for the eye. The relationship of eye movements to cognitive development has been studied since the 1890
s, the groundwork for which was laid by investigation into physiological optics by Hermann von Helmholtz and Ernst Mach in the 1860s. Visual tracking and stability of gaze are major milestones in early infancy. The eyes are neurologically tied to the entire vestibular system: the conch-like inner ear facilitates hand-eye coordination and gives us direction and balance in the physical world. By processing depth cues, our eyes orient us in space and create and confirm our sense of individual agency. Those in whom eye movements and vestibular equilibrium are disrupted, I contend, cannot sense context and thus become passive to the world, which they do not see as an arena for action. Hence this perceptual problem may well have unwelcome political consequences.
Education must strengthen and discipline the process of visual attention. Today’s young have a modest, flexible, chameleonlike ability to handle or deflect the overwhelming pressure of sensory stimuli, but perhaps at a cost to their sense of personal identity. They lack the foolish, belligerent confidence of my own generation, with its egomaniacal quest for the individual voice. In this age dominated by science and technology, the humanities curriculum should be a dynamic fusion of literature, art, and intellectual history. Because most of my career has been spent at arts colleges, I have been able to experiment with a wide range of images in the classroom. The slide lecture, with its integration of word and picture, is an ideal format for engaging students who are citizens of the media age. Discourse on art works should be open to all humanities faculty. No specialist “owns” the history of art, which ultimately belongs to the general audience.
My students at the University of the Arts—painters, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers, animators, Web and industrial designers, screenwriters, dancers, actors, musicians, composers, and so forth—come from an unusually wide range of backgrounds, from working farms to affluent suburbs or the inner city. I have gotten good pedagogical results over the past two decades with canonical works of art that can be approached from the point of view of iconography. This method of art-historical analysis, sometimes called iconology, was formalized in the 1920s and 1930s by Erwin Panofsky from earlier theorizing by Aby Warburg and was further developed by Rudolf Wittkower and Ernst Gombrich. Iconography requires the observational skills and fine attention to detail of literary New Criticism but sets the work into a larger social context, consistent with late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century German philology. To help focus scrutiny, one must find images in art that are more vivid than what the students see around them every day. The point is not just to show pictures but to seek a commentary that honors both aesthetics and history. This is an exercise in language: the teacher is an apostle of words, which help students find their bearings in dizzy media space.
Provocations Page 37
